‘All right,’ the girl called down. ‘Now see if you can reach that foothold. To your left, just behind that broken stone . . .’
In this way, with the girl spotting one hand- or foothold after another, he managed to haul himself up out of the water.
Exhausted, he flopped on his belly on the bank.
He got his first good look at the children who had helped him. They were a girl and two boys. The girl looked about twelve, and the boys, wide-eyed, were no more than eight or nine. They wore simple shifts of bright blue cloth that looked oddly clean. They weren’t alike, not like siblings, a family.
One of the boys approached him, and Symat reached out a hand. But there was a soft chime, and his fingers passed through the boy’s palm. The boy yelped and drew back, as if it had hurt.
Symat looked at the girl. ‘You’re Virtuals.’
She shrugged. ‘We all are. Sorry we can’t help you up.’
‘I can manage.’ Not wanting to shame himself before this girl, he rolled on his back and sat up, panting hard.
The Virtuals stared at him. ‘My name is Mela,’ the girl said. ‘This is Tod, this is Chem.’
‘I got stuck,’ Symat said, hotly embarrassed.
Mela nodded, but he saw the corners of her mouth twitch. ‘You ought to put your clothes back on before you get too cold.’
One of the boys, Tod, said in a piping voice, ‘We can’t get them for you.’
‘Sorry,’ said the other, Chem. ‘Would you like some food?’
‘Yes.’
‘We’ll show you.’
Symat towelled himself on his jacket and dressed. His clothes dried quickly, and, sensing his low body temperature, warmed him. The three Virtual children watched him silently.
They led him into the city, away from the canal. They walked with a sound of rustling clothes, even of boots crunching on the scattered sand. But of the four of them only Symat left footprints.
‘We saw you breaking the windows,’ Tod said. ‘Why did you do that?’
‘Why not?’
Tod considered. ‘It’s wrong to break things.’
‘But nobody’s coming back here. People are leaving the planet altogether. What difference does it make?’
‘My parents are coming back,’ Chem said.
Mela said softly, ‘Chem—’
‘I wouldn’t throw stones,’ the boy said. ‘My parents wouldn’t like it.’
‘What parents? . . . You couldn’t throw stones anyway,’ Symat said. ‘You’re a Virtual.’
That seemed to hurt the boy, and he glanced away.
Mela was slim, thoughtful, grave. She didn’t react to this exchange one way or another. But somehow she made Symat feel ashamed of upsetting the Virtual boy.
They came to a building, an unprepossessing block in a neighbourhood of crystalline spires. It was as unlit as the others. ‘There’s food in here,’ Tod insisted. ‘Through that door.’ They stood waiting for him to open the door.
‘Why don’t you go in? You’re Virtuals. You could just walk through the wall.’
Mela said, ‘Protocol violations. We aren’t supposed to.’
‘It hurts,’ Chem said.
Symat said, ‘I haven’t been around Virtuals much.’ He stepped forward, pushed at the door’s polished surface, and it slid open.
The building was an apartment block. They wandered through suites of rooms. Heavy furniture remained, chairs and tables and beds, but smaller items had been taken away.
‘I’ve seen people take stuff,’ Symat said. ‘Clothes and ornaments and toys, even sets of plates to eat dinner. They carry them in suitcases and boxes when they go through.’
Mela asked, ‘Through where?’
‘Through the transfer booths. Imagine carrying plates and forks and knives into another universe!’
‘What are they supposed to take?’ Mela asked reasonably.
They came to a kind of kitchen, where a nanofood replicator was still functioning. Symat asked it to prepare him something warm, and soon rich smells filled the air.
‘It probably needs restocking,’ Mela said. ‘You can scrape up some algae from the canal, I guess.’
Chem said sharply, ‘If you can keep from getting stuck!’ He and Tod laughed.
Mela reproved the boys. Symat sat at a table and ate in dogged silence. The Virtuals stood around the table, watching him.
Chem said, ’Of course you won’t have to put more glop in the nanofood box if your parents come for you.’
‘They won’t come,’ Symat said, chewing. Mela watched him with that quiet gravity, and he felt impelled to add, ‘They don’t know I’m here.’
‘Are you hiding?’ Chem asked. ‘Did you run away?’
‘Did you do something wrong?’ Tod asked, wide-eyed.
‘They want me to go into a transfer booth with them. I don’t want to go.’
Chem said, ‘Why not?’
‘Because it would feel like dying. I haven’t done with this world.’
Chem said brightly, ‘I’d go with my parents. I always do whatever they want.’
Tod said maliciously, ‘They would go without you. They probably have already.’
‘No, they haven’t.’ Chem’s lips were working. ‘They’ll come back to me when—’
‘When, when, when,’ Tod sang. ‘When is never. They’re never coming back!’
‘And nor are yours!’
‘But I don’t care any more,’ Tod said. ‘You do. Ha ha!’
Chem, in a tearful fury, flew at Tod. The wrestling boys fell to the floor and crashed through table legs. Pixels flew and protocol-violation warnings pinged, but the table didn’t so much as quiver.
Symat watched curiously. He lived in a world saturated by sentience, where everything was aware, everything potentially had feelings. He understood Virtual children could be hurt, but he didn’t necessarily know what might hurt them.
‘Enough.’ Mela waded into the mêlée and pulled the boys apart. Chem, crying copiously, ran from the room. Mela said to Tod, ‘You know how it upsets him when you say such things.’
‘It’s true. Our parents are never coming back. His aren’t. We all know that.’
Mela put her hand on her heart. ‘He doesn’t know it. Not in here.’
‘Then he’s stupid,’ Tod said.
‘Maybe he is, maybe not. But we have to look out for him. All we have is each other now. Go after him.’
‘Aww—’ Tod pulled a face, but he went out obediently.
Mela looked at Symat. ‘Kids,’ she said, smiling faintly.
Symat, his head full of his own issues, chewed his food.
When he had done eating, the apartment was a little more like a home, a little less like a strange place. And, his muscles still aching from his time in the water, he realised he felt tired. He found a bathroom, and a bedroom stripped of light furnishings. He sat on a pallet.
The three Virtuals clustered in the doorway, looking at him.
‘I’m going to sleep,’ he said.
‘All right.’ They receded into the shadows.
Symat lay down on the pallet, and his clothes, sensing his intentions, fluffed themselves up into a warm cocoon around his body. Experimentally he ordered the room to dim its lights; the command worked. He turned over and closed his eyes.
He thought he slept.
But he heard murmuring. He saw the two boys in the dim light, standing at the foot of his pallet - no, hovering, their feet just above the ground. And they were talking, softly, and too rapidly for him to hear, like speeded-up speech. He heard a name: ‘The Guardians.’ Then one of them whispered, ‘He’s awake!’ And they fled, sliding through the solid wall like spectres, accompanied by a soft pinging.
So much for protocol violations, Symat said to himself. Those Virtuals were creepy. He didn’t understand where they had come from, what they wanted. But he reminded himself they were artificial; and like all artefacts they were here to serve humanity - him. He huddled down in his
clothes and went back to sleep.
When he rose and walked out of the apartment into the unchanging sunlight, the three Virtuals were waiting for him. They were sitting on a low stone wall, or at least they looked like they were doing so, Mela in the centre with the two boys to either side.
‘Um, thank you for bringing me to this place. The food.’
‘You’re human. That’s our job,’ Mela said.
‘I suppose it is. Thanks anyhow.’ He walked off down the street towards the canal.
When he looked back they were following. Perhaps they were waiting for him to give them more commands. He wouldn’t have admitted it, but he was glad to have some company.
Walking along the line of the canal they soon left the city behind. The canal continued to head towards the immobile sun, but now the water looked turbid, muddy.
While Mela walked with Symat, the two boys ran by themselves. They played elaborate games of hide and seek, which could involve hiding inside the fabric of a wall, which evidently didn’t hurt that much; the air was full of warning pings, and the laughter of the boys. It reminded Symat uneasily of their odd behaviour in the bedroom last night. Maybe they had been inhibited about violating their protocols around him. If so, the inhibition was wearing off.
They came to a small township, as empty as the city. The boys ran off to explore. Mela and Symat sat on a low wall.
He asked her, ‘How come I didn’t see you yesterday, before you found me in the canal?’
‘We didn’t want you to see us.’
He wondered what a Virtual had to hide from. ‘Why does Chem talk about “parents”? Virtuals don’t have parents.’
‘We did.’
It had been a craze, a few generations back. It began after humans had been pushed back to Sol system.
‘People still wanted kids,’ Mela said. ‘But you don’t want to bring kids into a defeated world. So they had us instead.’
A Virtual child could be a very convincing simulacrum of the real thing. You could raise it from infanthood, teach it, learn from it. It would have been trivial to realise a child physically, downloading complex sensoria into a flesh-and-blood shell, but such ‘dolls’ were unpopular, apparently violating some even deeper set of instincts. It was more comfortable to be with Virtuals, even if you couldn’t cuddle them.
And Virtual kids actually had advantages. You could back them up, rerun favourite moments. You could even wipe them clean if you really made a hash of raising them, though sentience laws discouraged this.
One feature, popular but hotly debated ethically, was the ability to stop the growth of your child at a certain age. You could stretch out a childhood for as long as you wanted, enough to match your own long lifespan. Some people kept their Virtual children as perpetual infants; generally, however, eight to ten years old was the chosen plateau range.
‘I’m twelve,’ Mela said. ‘Few ever got as old as me. For a long time I’ve been surrounded by kids younger than me.’
‘A long time? How long?’
Mela considered. ‘Oh, two hundred years, nearly.’
Symat, shocked, didn’t know what to say.
Times changed, Mela said. Now, in increasing numbers, people were leaving the world behind altogether, passing through the transfer booths to an unknown destination beyond. And the Virtual children couldn’t follow: you could take your pots and pans, but you couldn’t take your Virtual child.
More than that, Mela told him mildly, Virtual children had simply gone out of fashion, as had so many technological toys before them. It became embarrassing to admit you needed such an emotional crutch.
For all these reasons, the children were shut down - or more commonly just abandoned, perhaps after centuries of companionship every bit as intense as the bond between a parent and a real child.
‘Every last mother said she would come back. I always knew the truth. I was twelve years old. But Chem is only eight. He’ll be eight for ever. And he still believes. Every day he is disappointed.’
Every day for centuries, Symat thought, Chem wakes up full of pointless hope, trapped in childhood. ‘Tod seems to understand.’
‘He’s actually younger than Chem, but he’s tougher minded.’
‘How come?’
She shrugged. ‘His parents had him designed that way. You could choose what you liked. Chem’s parents must have wanted a child more dependent, more vulnerable.’
‘But they abandoned him anyway.’
‘Oh, yes.’
Symat said, ‘But I still don’t see—’
He heard a piercing scream. Mela broke off and ran into the township. Symat hurried after her.
They came to an open plaza. A number of children had gathered, perhaps a dozen, none older than eight or nine. No, not children - they were more Virtuals, as Symat could tell from the sparkling pixels and tiny pings that marked petty protocol violations. They all wore bland shifts and coveralls like Mela and the boys.
And these kids stood in a loose ring around Chem and Tod. The boys crouched on the floor, clinging to each other.
Mela ran forward. ‘Get away from them!’
Symat hurried after her. ‘What kind of game is this?’
‘No game,’ she called back. ‘They are bloodsuckers. They are trying to kill the boys.’
‘Kill them? How do you kill a Virtual?’
Mela didn’t answer. She waded into the attacking children, grabbing them and pulling them aside. But there were too many of them; they gathered around her and pushed her back, jeering.
Symat ran forward, fists clenched. ‘Back off.’
One of the girls faced him. She was shorter than he was, with a hard, cold face and her skin was waxy, almost translucent. She had drifted a long way from her core programming, he realised. ‘Whose child are you?’
‘I’m no child. I’m human.’
The girl jeered and pointed at Chem. ‘He thinks he’s human.’
Symat swung a hand at her face. His fingers passed through her pale flesh, scattering pixels. She flinched, shocked; that had hurt.
‘Do what I say,’ Symat said. ‘Leave my friends alone.’
The girl quickly recovered. ‘You can’t order us around. And you can’t hurt us.’
‘But we can hurt you,’ said a sly-faced boy.
‘Projections can’t hurt a human.’
‘Oh, yes, we can,’ said the boy. ‘We can come to you in the night. We can hide in walls, in your clothes, even in your body, human. You’ll never sleep again.’
The girl said, ‘You don’t have to be real to inflict pain. We’ve learned that in the years we’ve been out here. We will haunt you.’
Chem was crying. ‘Please, Symat, don’t let them hurt us.’
Symat stood, hesitant. The out-of-control Virtuals’ threats filled him with dread. And this wasn’t his fight; after all he hadn’t met Mela and the boys before yesterday. But Mela’s eyes were on him. His fists clenched again, he stepped forward. ‘Leave them alone or—’
The girl ran at him, burst through his chest, and pushed her hands through his skull so the insides of his eyeballs exploded with light. ‘Or what? What will you do, human?’
But the others didn’t follow her lead.
‘Kiri,’ the sly boy said. ‘Look at him.’
The girl turned, looked at Symat - and then stepped back, her mouth dropping.
Symat found himself surrounded by a circle of staring children. Even Mela and the boys were gazing at him wide-eyed. He saw that their protocol respect was weakening; some of them drifted up from the floor, and others tilted sideways, reaching impossible angles. They were like floating spectres, not children. They began to whisper, the strange, rapid speech he had heard from the boys in the night; he heard them mutter that strange name again - ‘the Guardians’.
And somehow Symat sensed the circle of scrutiny expanding beyond the limited circle of these children. After all, he reminded himself, these Virtuals were merely manifestations of the Mist, the cl
oud of artificial sentience in which all of Mars was immersed - and suddenly he was the centre of attention.
He had no idea what was happening, but he ought to make use of it. He raised his arms. ‘Get away!’
The strange children turned and fled, leaving the two boys weeping on the ground.
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